Theater Review: 'From Door to Door'

In From Door to Door the fusion of a wily play, three fine actresses and excellent direction make for a dynamic and pleasurable evening of theater.

By HELEN KAYE
Theater Review 88 (photo credit: )
Theater Review 88
(photo credit: )
From Door to Door By James Sherman Directed by Roy Horovitz Beersheba Theater September 8 So what if it's commercial? In From Door to Door (in Hebrew: Women Don't Paint), the fusion of a wily play, three fine and generous actresses and excellent direction make for a dynamic and deep-down pleasurable evening of theater. Jenny (Ela Vidislavky), the great-grandchild, has a supernumerary task. She appears at the beginning and end of the play to open and close the family photo album. Images from it appear throughout on the screen that forms a backdrop to Miki Ben-Canaan's elegantly functional two-level revolving set. Deftly costumed by Dalia Pen, Grandma Bessy (Chana Roth), daughter Mary (Na'ama Shapira) and granddaughter Debbie (Anabel Zamir) are three generations of Jewish women in America from 1935-2000 whose lives, loves, hopes, dreams, fears, frustrations and furies are interwoven with the events, memories and mores of those tumultuous years in a series of pithy scenes. What goes around comes around, but there is one bedrock constant: the love that binds mother to daughter to granddaughter. It perfuses the text, the direction and the actresses' work. As Bessy, Roth sometimes goes over the top, but she is so unapologetically exuberant that one must forgive her. As Debbie, Zamir's behavior echoes and yet differs from that of her mother, and Shapira's Mary has inherited some of her mom's mannerisms. Both portraits are sure, passionate and real. A wonderful show. Just one thing: Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, not '66 as the screen shows.